Dear Amsterdam: I Have Some Questions...

Dear Amsterdam: I have some questions.

It’s a lovely city and I’m so happy to be here, but there are somethings I don’t understand.

1. What’s up with this obsession with pancakes? Seriously, there are pancake houses everywhere. I do love pancakes, but this city’s obsession is borderline creepy.

2. You willingly admit the entire country is carved out of a swamp. Having now been driven through a fair chunk of the countryside, I see that the whole canal & drainage ditch system with its pumps and water management systems is truly amazing. But there is water freaking everywhere… how is there not an unimaginable mosquito problem? Indeed, why is the entire country not already dead from some combination of malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever and west nile virus?

3. Similar to the mosquito mystery above: with so much aquatic habitat, why is this country not 20 feet deep in hundreds of billions of ducks? The Netherlands should be a duck paradise… so why are there so few? Is someone eating them when I’m not looking? Do you secretly have an alligator problem you're not tell us about?

Just curious.

Luv,
Brian

Hotel Oddities

We have officially checked into the weirdest damn hotel ever. Good thing it’s free.

Michael won a trip to Amsterdam with three nights at the Lloyd Hotel. From its general appearance inside & out, it feels like an old warehouse was renovated into a hotel, but it was indeed built as a hotel a century ago to house those in the process of emigrating to South America via Amsterdam. The most recent renovations however make some interesting design choices…

We’re in the 6th floor, in what the hotel describes as one of their best rooms. Let’s be clear: it’s a loft: it is a single large room with exposed beams, posts & rafters on a cement floor. We do have some throw rugs here & there to spare one’s feet too much strain, but it’s a cold surface first thing in the morning. We have a large wooden table with two benches. There is a small chair & coffee table. There is a large king bed. Everything however is minimalist and white. It feels like a museum art installation.

In the far corner of the room is a walled off water closet: it is the only thing closed off from full view but it makes up for it with superlative acoustics. You can here every toilet paper tear –and worse.

Beside the WC in the main room is a deep bathtub. There is a shower head, but no shower curtain or enclosure: if you are bathing, you are putting on a show for everyone present, whether you want to or not. And if the shower head slips in your hand, you will be spraying water across the room and possibly your luggage, as I accidentally noticed this morning.

The bed itself is fine, but in its space there are no bedside tables or shelves of any kind, so there is no place to have an alarm clock if one needed such. I usually use the alarm function of my mobile phone but there is no place to put it. And even if there was, there is no place in that area of the room in which I could plug it in: the only two outlets are at opposite ends of the suite.

Next we come to a full length mirror, but it’s recessed in its own cubby and box frame. With no lighting whatsoever. I can see shadows of myself move in the mirror, but there isn’t enough light for anything else.

And finally, the last item in the row is the bathroom vanity. Note that: it is no where near the toilet or bathtub. Indeed, after doing one’s business in the WC, you have to exit the toilet and walk the length of the suite to wash your hands. At least the vanity has good lighting and fast hot water.

We paid extra for the breakfast, which is running about 17 euros per person. I accept that expense as a convenience, but it certainly isn’t for quantity. The breakfast buffet offerings include several types of bread & croissant, some shavings of salmon & specialty cold cuts, tea/coffee/juice, and some cereals. Anyone who actually worked for a living would be starving in an hour from such a meagre offering.

The breakfast buffet did have one saving grace however: a pain au chocolat to die for (or indeed which would kill you if consumed too frequently). Usually a pain au chocolat is a croissant with some chocolate baked inside. The hotel’s version however is a plain croissant which is dipped into a pot of chocolate to be entirely coated. At least the croissant won’t go stale if it’s encased in solid chocolate!

Given that the place isn’t costing more than our breakfasts, I should be less critical of the hotel. But if we were paying for this room, I would quickly have asked for a more conventional place. If I wanted to sleep in an art installation, I’d check in at MOMA.

Things I learned in Amsterdam

• I knew pot is legal & accepted here. I learned the downtown at night smells like San Francisco, but without the urine.
  
  
• I new there were trams (streetcars). Now I know the basic fare is 3 euros, and there are sales booths on most if not all trams. One badges in & out with each ride, as one does on most transit systems I’ve visited.
  
  
• I knew this was a bike-friendly city and there were lots of bikes. I didn’t know there were untold billions of them everywhere, and that the bike lanes can be shared with motorcycles, scooters and these weird tiny cars/utility vehicles which remind me of Bangalore.
  
  
• I knew there were canals, but I didn’t know they were more for show than for use. I thought there would be more public transit-style water taxis, but outside of tour boats, houseboats and occasionally a rowing team or squad of kayakers, the inner city canals seem to be mostly for show & tourism.
  
  
• This is a Coca-Cola town. You have to look hard to find Pepsi.
  
  
• It is shockingly easy to find Hershey products here. I had expected better of Amsterdam, if not the Netherlands. My theory is that prolonged pot use has dulled their taste.
  
  
• There is a strange obsession here with pancakes. Not that I object, but wow, so many carbs…
  
  
• There is an even stranger obsession here with Argentinian steakhouses. They are more common than Starbucks are in the US.
  
  
• Speaking of carbs, there are no fat people here. At least, the ones I saw are more likely to be tourists. I'm crediting the we-must-bike-everywhere attitude.
  
  
• This city is no place for the disabled. This isn't particular to Amsterdam: a lot of old cities have this problem because it is nearly impossible to make ancient historical buildings accessible to those with disabilities. But wow, I'm amazed how backward Amsterdam is in this regard. Of all the places we've visited the past several days, I think only the Rijksmuseum had a wheelchair-accessible entrance: everywhere else had narrow doors and steps.
  
  
• I'm unsure where Amsterdam stores its elderly. Until we went to the Keukenhof today, the number of people we've see who were older than myself could be counted on one hand. Is there some sort of "Logan's Run" Carousel thing going on here I should know about?
  
  
• All traffic here is trying to kill you. Well, not trying, really, but they will cheerfully run your ass over if you're not careful. There are sidewalks, bike lanes, traffic lanes and sometimes even tram lanes, and you need to look both ways for all of them and be prepared to run like hell. It took me some time to figure out how to do this while preserving my life & dignity, but it's largely to do with timing: I have a lifetime of experience judging the oncoming speed of a car at a glance, but not so much for bicycles. I think I've figured it out though so I'm cheating death for another day.
  
  There are more, but I'll add those as time goes on.